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Sunday, January 5, 2014

GURPS: Dwarf vs Dwarf vs Dwarf

When you get to a system with as many rulebooks as GURPS, you're bound to wind up with some overlap. The basic set gives a template for Dwarves. So does Dungeon Fantasy. They are both significantly different. And of course, every setting decides they're going to do it differently, so my dwarves for the Wastelands are also slightly different. This difference happens elsewhere too (how many types of elves are there? Shoemaker elves who are more like gnomes from the standard fantasy template, wood elves, high elves, etc) but dwarves are the fantasy race I am most likely to play, for a variety of reasons.

Basic set dwarves are, far as I can tell, the dwarves from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Diminutive, with stubby arms and legs, gold sensitivity, and resilient health. Good vision in the dark, high strength for their size, and long lives round them out. Given stats for the template are as follows

I'd actually thought that they had Dwarfism for their SM -1, which would kind of make sense, but it seems the template doesn't use that. They're typically strong enough to still use standard gear, despite being smaller (which is good, as Basic Set gives no rules for smaller gear). Despite their smaller size, these dwarves can go fast, as they do not have the reduced move found in dwarves in many settings.

The Dungeon Fantasy dwarves are those one might find in D&D. They keep the same resilient health, but they're big. What size they lose in height, they gain right back in width, maintaining their SM 0 status, and ability to use full size weapons. They lose their gold sense, but pick up greed instead to show their love of wealth. Extra toughness and a natural ability to carry weight balance out slower movement due to their broad builds. Given template stats are

Finally, we get to my dwarves. Similar to the dungeon fantasy dwarves, the dwarves of the Wasteland have a few things others don't. Many settings give dwarves the ability to see in total darkness, either by darkvision, or by thermographic vision. A combination of infravision and night vision seemed to make the most sense, particularly for masters smiths, where the ability to see something's color would be of great benefit, and ability to navigate one's way out of a lightless cave could be the difference between life and death. I'll go into a LOT more detail of their history and traditions, but here's my template just for a glance.